How To Restructure Your Relationship After Emotional Infidelity Has Occurred

When you're faced with an emotional infidelity, the natural reaction is to wonder if your relationship can be saved or not. While some don't class emotional infidelity to be as serious as traditional infidelity, the fact remains that trust has been damaged.

And since trust is key element of healthy relationships, you will both need to examine if trust can be rebuilt or if this emotional infidelity is a prequel to more serious problems in the relationship.

The Natural Response to Emotional infidelity

On discovery of emotional infidelity, the people will naturally ask themselves:

If they leave, will they be sorry about not giving the relationship a chance?

If they stay, will they have to constantly worry about a possible re-occurrence of the emotional infidelity or worse?

The fact remains that emotional infidelity can be recovered from, but it depends on the willingness of both partners to work on things. The following 5 points need to be worked on:

Communication: You will both need to discuss your thoughts on the relationship. Anything one of you feels is lacking in the relationship must be brought out into the open. In essence, what you're doing here is trying to get to the root cause of the emotional infidelity. If you don't get to this root cause, further emotional infidelity or physical infidelity might be on the cards down the line. Remember, if you want to solve a problem, you have to tackle exactly what's causing the problem.

Your health: Emotional infidelity can take a toll on your mental well-being. This in turn can affect your physical health. If you let the emotional infidelity affect you like this, you won't have the full energy required to work on saving the relationship. Eat right, get exercise, get enough sleep and get out with friends for support.

Commitment: Successful recovery from emotional infidelity requires an acknowledgement from your partner that they know what they did was wrong. Further more they need to be 100% committed to working on things with you. If this commitment isn't forthcoming, anything you do to save the relationship will be in vain.

Don't keep a grudge: If you want the relationship to recover, you have to set the clock back to zero and work on taking things forward from there. It doesn't mean you have to forget what your partner did, but rather means you shouldn't be holding a grudge or thinking that you must even the score. If they have apologized and you've forgiven, then put the emotional infidelity in the past and focus your energy towards making the relationship a success.

Relationship counseling: In cases of emotional infidelity, I recommend getting relationship counseling of some sort. You don't have to spend money on long repeated visits but just enough so you know 2 key things: The exact reason(s) that caused the emotional infidelity and how you can remedy the situation. If they're willing to go to it, relationship counseling also reveals if the individual is truly serious about the relationship or not.